Top Book Blogs 05/2019

[Guardian Books Blog] Calling BAME writers: entries open for 2019 short story prize

The hunt is on for up-and-coming writers who could scoop this year’s £1,000 Guardian/Fourth Estate prize A Chinese villager with no arms becomes a Paralympian swimming champion; a dapper elderly Jamaican spends New Year’s Eve in a south London police cell under suspicion of domestic abuse; a(May 1, 2019)

[The Millions] May Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here’s what we’re looking out for this month—for more May titles, check out(May 1, 2019)

[Book Forum] PAPER TRAIL: The Guardian posts a profit; Slow Burn has a new host

The Guardian has posted its first operating profit since 1998. In 2015, the paper reported a loss of nearly 75 million dollars. In the meantime, 450 jobs have been eliminated, with 120 of those jobs coming from editorial. Part of the turnaround has come from The Guardian’s digital strategy, which(May 1, 2019)

[Book Forum]
The Guardian posts a profit; Slow Burn has a new host

The Guardian has posted its first operating profit /www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48111464> since 1998. In 2015, the paper reported a loss of nearly 75 million dollars. In the meantime, 450 jobs (May 1, 2019)

I began reading Karen Havelin’s debut novel Please Read This Leaflet Carefully with the intention of reviewing it. Havelin’s protagonist Laura, a Norwegian expat who has settled in New York, lives with endometriosis and the chronic pain it causes. I was determined to be a good literary(May 1, 2019)

[The Millions] How Do You Like Your Copy?

Copy editors are a serious bunch to whom excitement comes slowly and furor over a misused semicolon comes quickly. At least, that’s what the popular narrative would have you think. Enter “comma queen” Mary Norris (of The New Yorker) and Random House copy chief Benjamin Dryer, both(May 1, 2019)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Of socialists

An agent of socialist change(May 1, 2019)

[Book Forum]
Of socialists

Lea Ypi (LSE): The Politics of Reticent Socialism /www.academia.edu/38114221/The_Politics_of_Reticent_Socialism_Catalyst_2018_>. The philosophical case for socialism: John Rawls is best known for “A (May 1, 2019)

[The Millions] Must-Read Poetry: May 2019

Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in May. Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal Take a poem from Nightingale, and you have the whole book. This is meant to be an expansive, not reductive, observation—Rekdal’s poems have lush contours and routes without becoming labyrinthine; she offers(May 2, 2019)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Democracy and technology in the age of artificial intelligence

After publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon in its international edition on Thursday, the New York Times has cancelled its contract with the company, CartoonArts International, who provided the image. The unnamed editor who decided to run the cartoon has been disciplined and Times publisher, A.G.(May 2, 2019)

After publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon in its international edition on Thursday, the New York Times has cancelled /www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/business/new-york-times-cartoon-anti-semitic.html> its (May 2, 2019)

[The Millions] Memorizing and Memory: One Writer’s Estranged Cousins

1. Memorizing My lines disappeared. I was in 10th grade, dressed in a blue-checked gingham dress and white tights, playing the lead in Alice and Wonderland for an audience of children. I’d had memory lapses before—an embarrassing one in my piano teacher’s living room in fifth grade, the(May 2, 2019)

[The Millions] Lynne Tillman Doesn’t Write About Art

“This doesn’t really tell you what he was like. I say what we did together, that he helped me, what I think he liked. I don’t know how to say what he was like. I loved him.” For The Los Angeles Review of Books, an interview with Lynne Tillman on her relationship with art(May 2, 2019)

The first three novels of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet—Autumn, Winter, and now Spring—are constructed not as linear stories, but as literary puzzles. To figure them out is to work their pieces together. Autumn and Winter worked: the pieces fit. Spring’s pieces, however, feel like bits and(May 3, 2019)

[Book Forum]
Lillian Ross’s account of a beleaguered Hollywood production

First published in 1952, Lillian Ross’s Picture, an eyewitness report of director John Huston’s adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage, remains the paradigm of a slim genre, the nonfiction account of (May 3, 2019)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Party and ideology

Are we beginning to see signs that the parties might one day split?(May 3, 2019)

At the New Republic, Jacob Silverman writes about the economy of freelance journalism and the indignities a writer trying to scrape together a living often suffers. Silverman also notes the ways in which those who feel writing is a calling have blind spots about their own precarious situation:(May 3, 2019)

[Book Forum]
The perils of freelancing; Jenny Turner on Mark Fisher

At the New Republic, Jacob Silverman writes /newrepublic.com/article/153744/gig-economy> about the economy of freelance journalism and the indignities a writer trying to scrape together a living often (May 3, 2019)

[The Millions] Harper Lee’s Unsolved Mystery

True crime is more than a recent podcast trend—just take a look at Casey Cep’s forthcoming Furious Hours. The book tells the tale of Harper Lee’s journey to Alexander City, Ala., in the 1970s to write about a gruesome murder that was staged to look like a car accident. A video produced by(May 3, 2019)

[Salon Books] The working poor in the Hamptons: I cleaned a rich author's swimming pool while writing my own novel

I think about the authors in disguise all around us when I’m in a restaurant or passing by a construction site(May 4, 2019)

[Guardian Books Blog] Poem of the week: Suppose by Phoebe Cary

These lines of no-nonsense advice to Victorian children show their age in gender politics, but retain a cheering vigour SupposeSuppose, my little lady, Your doll should break her head, Could you make it whole by crying Till your eyes and nose are red? And would n’t it be pleasanter To treat it as(May 6, 2019)

Josh Denslow’s debut collection, Not Everyone Is Special, follows a cast of memorable characters who have resigned themselves to failure. “I do indeed write about broken souls, but I tend to think of my characters as superheroes,” Denslow told me. “Except instead of courageously moving(May 6, 2019)

[Book Forum] DAILY REVIEW: Are Your Commie Children Right?

Adam Gopnik’s defense of liberalism(May 6, 2019)

[Book Forum]
Adam Gopnik’s defense of liberalism

A specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad--the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts (May 6, 2019)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Messing with the cosmos

A different kind of theory of everything(May 6, 2019)

[Book Forum]
Messing with the cosmos

A different kind of theory of everything: Physicists used to search for the smallest components of the universe /www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-different-kind-of-theory-of-everything> -- what if (May 6, 2019)

Tonight at the National Arts Club in New York, Graywolf Press will celebrate /www.nationalartsclub.org/default.aspx?p=.NETEventView&ID=3864657&qfilter=&type=0&ssid=323204&chgs=> its forty-fifth (May 6, 2019)

[Guardian Books Blog] Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?

Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them Are you on Instagram? Then you can be featured here by tagging your books-related posts with #GuardianBooksScroll down for our favourite literary linksRead more Tips, links and suggestions blogsWelcome to this week’s(May 6, 2019)

[The Millions] Will the Real Sherlock Holmes Please Stand Up?

In 1893, Sherlock Holmes was approaching the peak of his popularity when his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, decided to do the unthinkable. He vowed to kill off his literary progeny. The method he would use came to him on a trip he made to Switzerland that summer—he would dispose of the world’s(May 6, 2019)

[Salon Books] Take it from the youngest winner of the toughest horse race: "We all have a bold mode"

Salon talks to Lara Prior-Palmer about "Rough Magic" and her historic 2013 win of the grueling Mongol Derby(May 6, 2019)

[The Millions] Marginalia in the Digital Age

With the advent of e-books and digital reading, does marginalia still exist? Over at Real Life, Alexandra Molotkow looks at how marginalia has evolved within social media. “[In 2011], Twitter was still sometimes referred to as ‘micro-blogging,’ blogs themselves having descended(May 6, 2019)

Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from the likes of Casey Cep, Chia-Chia Lin, Juliet Grame, Ani DiFranco, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Millions keep(May 7, 2019)

[Guardian Books Blog] American Tabloid by James Ellroy is our Reading group book for May

Following mobsters, thugs and spies in the lead up to John F Kennedy’s assassination, Ellroy’s 1995 novel is the first in his Underworld USA trilogy “It’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to(May 7, 2019)

Two Reuters reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, have been freed from prison in Myanmar after being held for more than five-hundred days. The journalists were accused of breaking the Official Secrets Act. Originally sentenced to seven years behind bars, the pair were granted amnesty by president Win(May 7, 2019)

[The Millions] This Is the Fruit I’ll Never Die For: Featured Poetry by Paisley Rekdal

Our series of poetry excerpts continues with a poem by Paisley Rekdal from her new book, Nightingale, a careful, hypnotic work. The book opens with “Psalm,” a poem about a narrator’s observation of her impatient, earnest neighbor, who, despite the “ice-sheathed”(May 7, 2019)

[The Millions] A Way Out of No Way

For The LA Review of Books, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor reviews Saidiya Hartman’s new book, Wayward Crossings, Beautiful Experiments. The book, which Taylor describes as “a radical, genre-defying examination of the lives of ‘ordinary’ young Black women” in the early 20th(May 7, 2019)

[The Millions] Caring Is Creepy: Ian McEwan and ‘Machines Like Me’

I am not a completist by nature or inclination. Even if I enjoy a novel or album a great deal, I tend to let chance determine what the next thing is I’ll read or listen to. There are very few musicians/writers/filmmakers whose entire body of work I’ve felt compelled to digest: Kubrick, The(May 8, 2019)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: After the global financial crisis

Was the Great Recession more damaging than the Great Depression?(May 8, 2019)

[Book Forum]
After the global financial crisis

Robert C. Hockett (Cornell): Ten Years On /osf.io/preprints/lawarxiv/bea5u/>: What Have We Learned? What Have We Done? What Must We Do? Ross P. Buckley (UNSW), Emilios Avgouleas (Edinburgh), and Douglas (May 8, 2019)

[Book Forum] PAPER TRAIL: Rachel Louise Snyder’s urgent new book on the myths of domestic violence; Will journalists learn from their past mistakes?

At the Columbia Journalism review, Todd Gitlin wonders if the news media has learned the right lessons from their mistakes covering the 2016 presidential race: “Learning trivial lessons will not do for 2020. The dishonor and depredations of the Trump presidency expose every single one of the(May 8, 2019)

[Book Forum]
Rachel Louise Snyder's urgent new book on the myths of domestic violence; Will journalists learn from their past mistakes?

At the Columbia Journalism review, Todd Gitlin wonders /www.cjr.org/politics/journalism-lessons-2020.php> if the news media has learned the right lessons from their mistakes covering the 2016 presidential (May 8, 2019)